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The trade in horses moved north from New Mexico, following well-worn indigenous trading routes that moved along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains at the point where the mountain region gradually melted into the Great Plains. They forced the Spanish out of the region, took control of an enormous number of Spanish horses, and began a lucrative horse trade. In 1680, the Pueblo Indians living in the Spanish colony of New Mexico revolted. Why, and how, did the Comanche unleash such devastation in Mexico… and by doing so unintentionally lay foundations for American conquest? The story begins a century and half before the U.S.-Mexico War, when the Comanche began to forge an indigenous empire based on dominating the trade in horses and bison hides across the Great Plains, and beyond. Army found the road to Mexico’s capital essentially wide open. Comanche warriors raided cities within a mere three-day ride of Mexico City itself. They forged war trails a thousand miles long that pushed through Mexico’s deserts, mountains and jungles. Shortly after Mexico liberated itself from Spain, Comanche war bands pushed deep into the interior of the newly independent, but war-weakened country. The Comanche had not only prevented the Spanish Empire from pushing further into what would become the United States… they had turned the Spanish colonies of New Mexico and Texas into virtual colonies of their own. The destruction of northern Mexico was the work of the indigenous masters of much of the Southwest: the Comanche. invasion got underway.”Īnd indeed, it had.

In the words of historian Pekka Hämäläinen, “It was as if northern Mexico had already been vanquished when the U.S. Army marched down abandoned roads, past burned-out villages and through deserted ghost towns littered with corpses rotting in the sun.

When the United States invaded Mexico in 1846, the soldiers who marched through what are today Mexico’s northern states encountered desolation. Image: map showing the extent of Comanche raiding into Mexico during the 1830s and 1840s, from Brian Delay’s “ War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War.” The following article is primarily based on Delay’s work, as well as Pekka Hämäläinen’s “ The Comanche Empire.”